Okay, so it looks like the ArduinoOTA is a reasonably simple setup using UDP packets to configure than TCP to transfer. It looks like it uses a MD5 hash for the password. Once everything's set up, the module opens a TCP port up to the initiating host and writes everything it receives into place.

looks like it should be portable away from the rest of the system - should be able to be programmed in C... intent is to make something tiny

Right now I'm in a bit of a bind in that the arduino variant software I just wrote works great but is too large to hold in my other CPU and I never designed the board for direct programming of the ESP8266 (the CPU was supposed to do that)... so making an initial bootstrap is one of the available options

Hi, I'm having trouble with WiFi.scanNetworks(), I'm in AP mode trying to get other networks around me and send them using websockets to my config page. Unfortunately scanNetworks returns 0 all the time. I also tried scanning in STA mode, here is code http://pastebin.com/jpPnHb8K